Physical Sciences Division Staff Awards & Honors

Authors Clamor To Read, Cite Article on Nanowires in Bacteria

A recent paper on nanowires produced by Shewanella oneidensis strain MR-1 has received a lot of attention in the scientific community. Enlarge image

Nanowires and the bacteria that produce them have proven to be a very popular topic within the scientific community. An article showing that many common microbes create nanowires—a process previously thought to be used by only a select few—to transfer electrons was recently named a hot paper by ISI's Essential Science Indicators. Every 2 months, ISI publishes a list of the "hot papers in science." These papers are chosen because of their meteoric rise in the scientific literature, as the articles are cited time and time again within just 2 years of publication.

On the January 2008 list, the article "Electrically conductive bacterial nanowires produced by Shewanella oneidensis strain MR-1 and other microorganisms" appears as a hot paper. The article has been cited 48 times since it was published 18 months ago.

To detect the nanowires, researchers used scanning and transmission electron microscopes, tunneling spectroscopy, fluorescence microscopy at the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, a national scientific user facility. This work was part of the EMSL Scientific Grand Challenge project.

This paper was authored by 24 scientists from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, University of Guelph in Canada, Gwangiu Institute of Science and Technology in Korea, Water Environment and Remediation Research Center in Korea, Pennsylvania State University, and the University of Southern California. At PNNL, the authors were Yuri Gorby (now at the Venter Institute), Svetlana Yanina, Jeff McLean (now at the Venter Institute), Kevin Rosso, Alice Dohnalkova, David Culley, Bree Reed, Margie Romine, Eric Hill, Liang Shi, Dwane Elias (also of the University of Missouri), David Kennedy, Grigoriy Pinchuk, and Jim Fredrickson.